Never mind the language, what a spectacle

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Centuries ago, one opera won over English audiences to a new style,
writes Roger Covell.

Ever wondered how and when English-speaking audiences first
accepted the idea that opera for them would be a musical and
theatrical genre largely sung in foreign languages?

If you find that idea in itself illogical, absurd, distressing
or aggravating, blame it on Handel's Rinaldo, which Opera
Australia is about to revive (in its original Italian). This was
the work, the first foreign-language opera specifically designed
for London, that took the city's establishment by storm in
1711.

It persuaded the London public for musical theatre that there
were sufficient musical and scenic attractions in this story of
Christian knights besieging a Saracen-held Jerusalem to make it
addictive: Rinaldo kept turning up in London seasons for the
next 20 years.

Most of the theatregoers attending the 15 performances of its
first season seem to have found the opera irresistible even when
they had to consult the printed libretto, with its matched columns
in English and Italian, to find out what the sung words meant.
Handel, a German who had become a master of the Italian style and
was shortly to settle in England permanently, helped make the
experience a regular part of London life by writing a further 35
operas on Italian texts in the following three decades.

One potent attraction of Rinaldo in 1711 was the
spectacle provided by Aaron Hill, manager of the Queen's Theatre in
the Haymarket. It included the arrival of a sorceress in an aerial
chariot drawn by dragons, mermaids sporting and singing in a
maritime scene, the release of real sparrows (and possibly
chaffinches) to coincide with an aria celebrating birdsong, battle
scenes and a magic mountain with a magician's cave. The flying
machinery and the sets of five parallel grooves in the theatre
wings delivered striking changes of scene in seconds.

An even more powerful asset of the production was, from all
accounts, the generally high standard of the singing in combination
with Handel's splendid arias, some of them adapted from music he
had composed in Italy.

Listeners marvelled at the singing of the alto castrato Nicolo
Grimaldi, known as Nicolini, in the title role and admired his
acting.

There were, of course, dissenting noises off, sometimes from
conservative defenders of the older English preference for spoken
plays with inserts of masque-like musical spectacle.

Joseph Addison, still smarting from the recent failure of
Rosamond, an opera for which he had written an English text,
had fun in The Spectator with the possibilities opened up by
the release of the Rinaldo sparrows and expressed genuine
indignation at the change from all-English and even bilingual
stagings to the delivery of every recitative and aria in a foreign
tongue: "For there is no Question but our great Grand-children will
be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to
sit together like an Audience of Foreigners in their own Country,
and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they
did not understand."

Nearly 20 years later John Gay turned operatic social
hierarchies upside down in using The Beggar's Opera to
satirise the British government while still drawing on operatic
melodies as well as on popular songs and ballads for his tunes.
Macheath and his fellow highwaymen sing roisteringly about resuming
their trade (Let us take the road) but do it to the tune of
the march of the Christian forces in Rinaldo.

The odd thing is that Addison's grumble (partly based on his
assumption that music counted for less than words) would have been
endorsed by opera's Florentine founders, who viewed their technique
of dramatic recitative as essentially the affective heightening of
speech. It would also have had the assent of many opera composers,
including Wagner, who once advised 19th-century correspondents in
Melbourne proposing to present one of his operas that his works
should always be given in English in an English-speaking
country.

The arguments for retaining an opera's original language in
major performances remain much the same as they were in Handel's
time. Principal singers of international renown need their
performances to be readily portable (that is, without having to
learn a new set of words) and, in aesthetic terms, there is an
undoubtedly strong affinity between the sound of the original
language and the way it is set.

The cause of opera in vernacular translation is not lost (though
some of its partisans fail to credit music with its overriding
contribution to opera's blend of arts).

Its rationale has been weakened by the arrival of surtitles,
with all their inevitable faults of timing and distraction; and,
thankfully, we have a few more repertory operas in English. Yet,
for most major companies in the English-speaking world, the
situation initiated by Rinaldo is still with us nearly three
centuries later.